Seasonal Landcover Change over the Eastern United States

The Blue Marble Next Generation data set provides a monthly global cloud-free true-color picture of the Earth's land cover at a 500-meter spatial resolution. This visualization of the data set shows seasonal variations such as snowfall, spring greening and droughts in a seamless fashion, thereby heightening awareness of changes in the Earth's climate. Here we focus on the seasonal land cover changes over the Eastern United States. This data set is derived from imagery taken in 2004 by the MODIS instrument on the Terra satellite.

This animation shows how the landcover changes with the seasons as we fly over the Eastern United States, from Florida to Maine. This version is in HD widescreen format and has light-colored state boundaries.